26 February 2008 6:23 PM

I was struck last week by the treacly response given to the retirement of the grisly old monster, Fidel Castro. In so many leftist media, from the BBC to the Guardian, we were offered the usual muck about Cuba's supposedly excellent schools and health care, by people who referred to the pensioner tyrant by his Christian name, 'Fidel', as if he were a personal friend rather than one of the remotest and most inaccessible dictators in the world.

They also pretended that Cuba's 'National Assembly' was a real Parliament rather than what it is, an appointed chamber of toadies and puppets, and - though they claim to be outraged by the powerless British monarchy being handed on from father to son - they were un-outraged by the handing over of real supreme authority from brother to brother. Vertical inheritance is all wrong. Horizontal's cool. Republicans, they're so ridiculous, can you beat them?

What would these people think of someone who referred to General Pinochet as 'Augusto', or if he had handed over power to his sibling? And why - I'll come to this at length later - is Castro allowed to maintain the death penalty, and to keep his popularity with the Left , whereas if I say I'm in favour of it, I'm a pariah from one end of Islington to the other?

By the way, I think all these pro-Castro ( sorry 'Fidel') people should be compelled, if they fall ill, to go to Cuba and - without access to hard currency - be left to endure the Cuban health service they so idiotically praise, under the same conditions suffered by the Cuban people. I think we would then hear a lot less about Castro's marvellous health service. The main 'evidence' for this claim comes of course from the Cuban state, famous for its severe prevention of independent journalism or any other critical examination of its activities.

As for the schools, they may well be better than ours at teaching children to read (not difficult) but some, notably the Lenin High School in Havana, are a good deal less equal than others. Like its British equivalents, the London Oratory, William Ellis and the Camden High School for Girls, the Lenin High School provides the children of a leftist elite with a far better education than they might get elsewhere. Everyone in Havana knows this. Why doesn't the Guardian know it? Or the BBC?

Anyway, the problem with being educated in Cuba is that, once you've been educated, there's nothing to read except the works of K. Marx and V.Lenin, or of course the collected speeches of F.Castro and E.Guevara. - and the world's worst and most absurdly-titled newspaper 'Granma'. (I'll explain later how this journal gets its ludicrous name).

But back to the death penalty. The countries which wield this most keenly these days are all left-wing states. The People's Republic of China, of course, tops the world execution league. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is also quite a keen execution state - supposedly 'corrupt' businessmen have been shot in public, with lemons stuffed in their mouths to stop them screaming.

And then there's Cuba. The jolly, liberal fun revolution of 1959, with all those glamorously-bearded young men in fatigues in charge, began with howling show trials (the few not-guilty verdicts reversed on a whim by the leader himself) and much spraying of bullets, screaming and splattering of blood, a lot of it ordered by the picturesque Ernesto Guevara. The bullet-pocks from the firing squads can still be inspected (I have done so) in the moat of the La Cabana fortress, now a tourist site but until recently a squalid prison. Total figures for those judicially murdered by the Castro terror are not available, but the distinguished Historian Hugh Thomas has put the figure (perhaps modestly) at 5,000.

More recent executions have been colder, more secret and even more sinister. The 1989 shooting of General Arnaldo Ochoa, after a largely secret trial, ostensibly for alleged drug trafficking, is generally thought in Cuba to have been the despotic snuffing out of a dangerous rival who might have defected. Ochoa, a former ' hero of the revolution, technically faced a maximum of 20 years in prison for his crime. But in lawless Cuba, where 'Fidel' was all-powerful, Ochoa went to the firing squad anyway. It was typical of Cuba that a political case should have been dressed up as a criminal one, so that Castro could continue to pretend that he has no political prisoners. Opponents of the regime are almost invariably persecuted for imagined or fanciful violations of the criminal code.

So why do the Left swallow this camel, praising and sucking up to and romanticising this sordid despotism, and ignoring its habit of killing opponents, but strain at the gnat of hanging a few heinous murderers here in Britain?

It's all from the same root - the Left's worship of the supposedly all-benevolent state which they control, or hope to control. Get in the way of that, and you can be liquidated. It is the supreme law, and you will be an expendable casualty in a wider war. In fact, most socialists once they have supreme power, happily reintroduce the death penalties they campaigned against when they were powerless.

When I pointed out in my 'Brief History of Crime' that the 1930s English barrister D.N.Pritt, a prominent campaigner against the death penalty was a leading apologist for Stalin's show trials ( which always ended in death for the accused), I drew upon myself the livid rage of leftist critics. How dare I suggest an inconsistency in the Left on the basis of this horrible man? Yet when it comes to the Stalins of today, the Pritts of today still suffer from the same doublethink. You can work out who I'm getting at.

And now, for those of you faced with arguments at work or in the pub about the death penalty, I shall now provide a Question and Answer guide to the case for hanging.

Q. Well, I would be in favour of the death penalty, but I am worried about innocent people being hanged. Doesn't that fear make it impossible to have a death penalty?

A. No. It is a perfectly good argument for taking a huge amount of trouble to ensure that innocents are not executed. It is also a good argument for bringing back some sort of property or education qualification for juries, and abolishing majority verdicts. Nobody should be hanged except on a unanimous verdict of mature and educated people. But the world isn't perfect, and we don't let this concern for the innocent stand in the way of lots of other policies, many of them supported by the very people who raise this objection to execution.

For instance, every three years, two people are killed by convicted murderers released early from prison. These victims are innocent. In that case, the liberals who advance this argument would have to accept that every convicted murderer should be locked up for life without the chance of parole so as to avoid the risk to the innocent. But they don't believe this. So where's their concern for innocent death now? Then again, most people supported the Kosovo war and still do (especially liberals). But when we bombed Serbia, we knew that innocents were bound to die, and they duly did die - including the make-up lady at the Belgrade TV station. That didn't stop these liberal leftists, who oppose hanging guilty murderers, from supporting it, and continuing to support it after those deaths had taken place.

Not a liberal leftist? Then there's our mad transport policy which just happens to suit quite a lot of us down to the ground, of relying so heavily on motor cars that we require an incredibly feeble driving test and allow tens of thousands of unskilled people to drive cars at a far too young age. We know from experience that this will result, every year , in at least 3,000 deaths. Yet we do nothing.

Our failure to act, in the knowledge that this failure will lead to those deaths, is deliberate, conscious self-interested negligence, morally equivalent to deliberate proxy killing for personal advantage (as offered by Harry Lime to Holly Martins in the Big Wheel in 'The Third Man'). It is also the reason why the courts don't adequately punish those who kill while driving. We're all conscious that driving isn't really safe, that we impose far too much responsibility on drivers in a fundamentally dangerous system, and that it could so easily have been us who did the killing. Personally I think this intolerable carnage is a much more urgent problem in our society than the faint hypothetical risk of hanging someone for a murder he didn't commit. So is the growing level both of homicide itself, and of violence that would be homicidal were it not for our superb emergency surgeons, who nightly drag back dozens from the lip of the grave.

People dislike being told this because it is absolutely true and very harrowing. These deaths are all of innocent people. If the fear of killing an innocent person really was an overwhelming veto on a public policy, then the driving test would have to made so difficult that most of us could never pass it, speed limits would have to be lower than they are now, and private car ownership restricted to a tiny few highly-skilled persons.

The truth is that the fear of killing innocents is not a reason to abolish or ban capital punishment. If it were, we'd have to abolish the armed services and be forced to ride bicycles. It's an excuse for people not to face up to their responsibilities.

Q. How can you express moral disapproval of killing, by killing someone else?

A. It is not killing we are trying to express loathing for. It is murder. All of us, except absolute pacifists, accept that killing is sometimes justified. In simple self-defence, the case is easy. In defensive war, in which aggressive actions are permitted, less straightforward but still acceptable to most of us. And I think quite a few of us would be ready to forgive and condone in advance an assassination of an aggressive tyrant before he could embark on war. So we license armed forces to shoot back at our attackers, or to attack our attackers in retaliation or deterrence.

What we are disapproving of is murder ( the Commandment is not, as so often said 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' but 'Thou Shalt do no Murder'). This remember, is the deliberate, premeditated, merciless (and often prolonged and physically cruel in the extreme)killing of an innocent person, generally for the personal gain of the murderer. There is no comparison between such an action and the lawful, swift execution of a guilty person, after a fair trial with presumption of innocence, the possibility of appeal and of reprieve.

Absolute pacifists are at least consistent, but if they had their way we'd be in a German empire where innocent people were being executed all the time with gas-chambers, guillotines and piano-wire, and worse. So their consistency doesn't offer much of a way out.

Q. But deterrence doesn't work. Most states in the USA have the death penalty and the murder rate is often higher there than in states that don't have it.

A. First of all, this is not the USA, a country with far higher levels of violence(until recently anyway) than we have had for centuries. Comparisons between the two countries need to be made with great care. Secondly, no US state really has the death penalty. Even Texas, which comes closest, still fails to execute the majority of its convicted murderers, who fester for decades on death row while conscience-stricken liberals drag out their appeals to the crack of doom.Most states which formally have the penalty on their books seldom or never apply it.

The 1949 Royal Commission on Capital Punishment (which was inconclusive on deterrence and most other things) pointed out that deterrence was very hard to establish. Countries which abolish the death penalty usually do so after a long period of suspension, or when it is hardly used, or when the law is unclear. So the murder rates before and after the formal date of abolition often tell us very little. In Britain, this is also the case. The death penalty had its teeth drawn in 1957 and the annual number of executions in the final years of capital punishment was small. So the penalty's official date of abolition, 1965, is misleading. There's another feature of this I'll turn to later.

Then there is the difficulty of classifying murder. The 1957 Act introduced a category of 'manslaughter due to diminished responsibility' which got you off the death penalty. And so, for the eight years after 1957, this category of homicide grew quite sharply. Some suspect that these are cases which would have been murders before 1957. If that is so, as we shall see, then it makes quite a lot of difference. Since then, it has not been so important, since the difference between a manslaughter sentence and the so-called 'life' sentences given for murder is no longer as stark as the old distinction between a prison sentence or an appointment with Mr Albert Pierrepoint on the scaffold.

Nowadays, it is suspected (especially by the relatives of victims who write to me about this complaining) that quite a lot of cases which would once have been prosecuted as murder are now prosecuted as manslaughter so as to get a quicker, easier conviction.

So the homicide statistics offer a rather wobbly idea of what is going on. Skip this if you want, but it is important. The blurred categories might suggest one thing, while actually saying another. Even so, here are some samples.In 1956, when the death penalty was still pretty serious, there were 94 convictions for homicide in England and Wales (all future figures refer to England and Wales unless otherwise stated). Of these, 11 were for infanticide, 51 for manslaughter and 32 for murder. In 1958, after the softening of the law, there were 113 homicide convictions - 10 infanticides, 48 manslaughters, 25 for manslaughter with 'diminished responsibility' and 30 for murder. By 1964 there were 170 homicide convictions - 12 infanticides, 73 manslaughters, 41 manslaughters due to 'diminished responsibility' , 44 murders. So, in eight years, a rise in homicide from 94 to 170, quite substantial. But those convicted for murder had risen only from 32 to 44, which hardly seems significant at all. What was really going on here could only be established by getting out the trial records. But it is at least possible that, by reclassifying and downgrading certain homicides, the authorities had made things look a good deal better than they were. Remember, these are convictions, not totals of offences committed.

Sorry, more statistics here. In 1966, immediately after formal abolition, there were 254 homicide convictions, 72 of them for murder. In 1975, 377 homicide convictions, 107 for murder. In 1985, 441 manslaughter convictions, 173 for murder. In 2004, there were 648 homicide convictions - including 361 murders, 265 ordinary manslaughters and 22 'diminished responsibilities'. Interestingly, more people were convicted of manslaughter (265) than were charged with it (137) and none of those convicted of 'diminished responsibility' (22) were charged with it . Many murder prosecutions failed (759 were proceeded against).

The increasingly important charge of 'attempted murder' has also run into trouble. In 2004 417 were proceeded against, and 96 convicted. Prosecutions for wounding or other acts endangering life was even more troublesome, with 7,054 proceeded against and 1,897 convicted. These figures, again,. are for charges and convictions rather than instances of the offence, which in both cases is considerably higher. Offences of wounding etc are now close to the 19,000 mark each year, around triple the total for 30 years ago.

And many of these cases would have been murders, if we still had the medical techniques of 1965. Again, this makes direct 'before ' and 'after' comparisons, required for a conclusive case for or against deterrence. hard. And we must also remember the general moral decline that has accompanied the weakening of the law, and may have been encouraged by it. If you remove the keystone of an arch, many other stones, often quite far away in the structure, will loosen or fall.

Finally, a little historical curiosity which I personally find fascinating. Some American researchers suggest that the sort of murder which has increased since the death penalty in the USA was effectively abolished is so-called 'stranger' murder, for example, the killing of a woman by her rapist , or of a petrol station attendant by the man who has robbed him. The calculation ( and criminals do calculate) is simple. "If I leave this person alive, she or he can testify against me, and I could go to jail for a very long time. If I kill him or her, then there will be no witness and I will probably get away with it entirely. And even if I am convicted of murder, all that will happen is jail time." Bang.

So, the death penalty may actually prevent or deter violent crimes which might otherwise end in an opportunist killing. It is said that British bank-robbers, before 1957, would search each other for weapons in case one of them killed, and they all swung - which was then the rule.And Colin Greenwood, a former police officer and expert on Gun Crime, produces the following interesting , in fact gripping fact. In both 1948 and 1956, the death penalty was suspended in this country while Parliament debated its future. During both periods of suspension, armed and violent offences rose sharply. After the 1948 attempt to abolish hanging failed ( Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin being among the Labour MPs who voted to keep it), they fell sharply. After 1956, when the law was weakened, they fell back again, but not so sharply. In 1964, they rose again, and have been doing so ever since.

I think this, taken together, is strong evidence for a deterrent effect. I am not talking about total deterrence - some crimes could never be deterred - but partial and significant, potentially lifesaving. How many innocents have died, or been horribly maimed, because those who accept the salaries and perks of office are not prepared to assume its hard duties, and wield the civil sword?And yet opponents of the death penalty whimper on about the minuscule danger of hanging the wrong person.

Q. Surely revenge has no part in a civilised society? A.How true, and how right. One of the purposes of stern penalties is to prevent revenge by making it clear that the law has real teeth. But a toothless law will lead to the return of revenge among us. The bargain we strike with our rulers is that we give up the right to personal vengeance, and the endless blood-feuds that follow it. And in return, we ask our rulers to wield a stern law, dealing with wrongdoing in such a way as to drive home the moral lesson that no evil deed goes unpunished. It's a simple contract. Civilised, law-governed societies rest on it, but our political class prefer not to fulfil it because they haven't the moral guts to take responsibility for sending a murderer to his death. It is this gutlessness among politicians, more than anything else, that has led to the abolition of the death penalty. They won't take the responsibility. This cannot be said often enough. The result is that responsibility is increasingly handed over to an unofficially armed police force, which shoots people without trial, appeal or the possibility of reprieve, and often gets it wrong. Watch the numbers grow.

But that's only the beginning. If ( as I fear) respect for the criminal justice system continues to dwindle especially among the abandoned honest poor, we can expect to see an increase of vigilante private 'justice', even lynch-mobs. What the left-liberals don't seem to grasp is that if they strangle justice, revenge is what they will get. And then, rather too late, they will be able to tell the difference between the two. I wish there was some other way to explain it to them.

*Oh, yes, and the reason why the Cuban Communist paper is called 'Granma' is that this was the name of the boat in which Castro and his friends arrived in Cuba for their second attempt to overthrow Batista. It is a smallish motorcruiser, whose original owner had named it in hour of his grandmother. I don't think Castro or his comrades ever realised that was what the name meant.

24 February 2008 12:10 AM

The worst scandal in this country is the way politicians arrange specially good schooling for their own children and force bad education on everyone else.

However many times it is exposed, it goes on unaltered because the political class have neither the wit nor the courage to restore selective schooling.

I won't list here all the ways in which Labour politicians fiddle their young into the best State schools, or pay fees, or discover a deep religious faith, or hire private tutors.

There are so many.

But let's just recall the case of Anthony Blair, who, while trilling "what I want for my own children, I want for yours", wangled his brood into a unique selective school beyond the dreams of millions.

And he never even pretended to be ashamed.

Well, we are now on the brink of a similar scandal, only this time involving the Tory leader.

As part of his conversion of his party into a copy of New Labour, David Cameron has announced that he hopes his children will be educated in State schools.

What he means is that he hopes, Blair-like, to get them into exceptional State schools, far better than the rest, then bask in the socialist virtue of his action.

And just now he is waiting to discover if he has succeeded. I won't name the poor innocent child.

But Mr Cameron has publicly said that he wants her to go to St Mary Abbots, a first-rate Anglican primary in the heart of Kensington in London.

Applications have just closed. Last year, 95 children pursued the 30 available places at St Mary Abbots.

I expect it will be just as tough this year.

The admissions rules are very strict, with priority given to those with "special needs", then to brothers and sisters of existing pupils, and then to those who are committed churchgoers at various levels – rules which might just favour the increasingly devout Camerons.

I really hope the school has enough sense to tell Mr Cameron to stop being silly and go away.

He is asking for many kinds of trouble.

He can easily afford private schooling. Why then deprive a poor home of a place at a rare good school?

If his child wins a place, there will certainly be disappointed parents, not so wealthy as the Camerons, who will be convinced that the selection has been rigged in some way.

Picture the headlines.

Mr Cameron's propaganda team will then try to attack the media for invading Mr Cameron's privacy.

No, he has invaded his own, by putting propaganda first, his own child second and everyone else's children third.

He should follow the example of his colleague George Osborne and pay fees.

And if he truly wants to help the State school system, he should drop his selfish, dogmatic opposition to the creation of more grammar schools.

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An enemy of the People's State

NOW we live in a People's Republic, we really should get used to the ways of our rulers.

If you were shocked to see 76-year-old Richard Fitzmaurice in handcuffs, you still haven't got it.

Offences against the power of the State are the ones that get you into real trouble.

Gather menacingly outside a policeman's home, and the policeman – knowing better than most that he is powerless to act – will move away, as Wayne Mawson did.

Kick someone's head as if it were a football, and you will be cautioned.

The law of the People's Republic doesn't actually protect private individuals.

But resist the State, refuse to hand over half your meagre pension to subsidise louts with tattoos, and to prison you must go, manacled by some woodenheaded private security man who is simply fulfilling the terms of his contract and knows that it is more than his job is worth to use any common sense or kindness.

Mr Fitzmaurice is now out of jail, thanks to an anonymous donor.

But he may well be back again – and if he's not, someone else will.

The council tax he refused to pay is a tax on prudence.

Coming from a generation that loathes debt, he carefully saved for his old age. And because his savings are more than £16,000, no great sum these days, he must pay the tax in full.

By contrast, the imprudent don't have to pay.

Here are some interesting figures from the King's Lynn area, where Mr Fitzmaurice lives.

Almost one household in 12 pays no council tax at all.

No wonder that so many young people now reckon that getting into debt is the sensible thing to do.

Thrift will only land them in handcuffs.

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Unrepentant serial killers and soft MPs

THEconviction of Steve Wright once again raises the obvious need for a death penalty for unrepentant murderers.

Most sensible people can see this without difficulty.

But the politicians' trade union stands against it, and you will notice that MPs of all parties claim that this is unthinkable, impossible in the modern world – as if the modern world were somehow kinder than the recent past, which is the reverse of the truth.

The political class dislike the death penalty because it makes them directly responsible for protecting the gentle.

They make the most pitiful excuses for being against it, which don't stand up to a moment's examination.

Absurdly, they claim to be worried about the deaths of innocent people, as if every murder victim was not innocent.

They want the power, and the plump privileges of office, but they shy away from the hard duties of government.

Well, in that case, they must be removed to make way for people who are ready to defend civilisation, even at the cost of a few sleepless nights.

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MOHAMED Al Fayed is a richly comic figure, tinged with tragedy by the sad death of his son.

His raving fantasies about the death of Princess Diana are, in a way, excusable.

Not so the performance of the Left-wing barrister, vegetarian and bore Michael Mansfield, who poses as a great radical and is a babyish republican of the sort who thinks that monarchy equals snobbery and toadying to rank.

Yet he toadies to Mr Fayed's money, and has made a colossal fool of himself by pursuing Mr Fayed's wild fancies at this inquest – a mere tongue for hire.

He is said to want to retire to a soundproof room to play the drums.

The sooner the better, and let us hope the soundproofing is really good, for his sake and ours.

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LABOUR'S new citizenship plans seem to me to be designed to be bent in practice, so that many very recent arrivals here will be swiftly allowed to take part in elections and vote Labour.

Meanwhile, conservative patriots continue to leave Britain in large numbers, while they still can.

And many more would leave if countries such as New Zealand did not have such tough migration rules.

How swiftly we are becoming an oppressed minority in what used to be our own country.

21 February 2008 2:23 PM

Now that they plan to allow teenagers to pass language GCSEs without taking an oral exam in the language in question - because such a test is too 'stressful' - all we can do is laugh. We no longer have an examination system in this country, just a system for issuing increasingly-devalued certificates in ever growing numbers. Yet this is actually quite popular.

Of course speaking a foreign language in front of a critical stranger is ‘stressful’. That is the point of it. Or at least it was when exams were designed to find out if you knew about the subject. Now, of course, they are about filling quotas, and reassuring the ill-educated that in our super-equal society, it doesn't matter that they don't know anything. At all costs, no feelings must be hurt in the running of our educational system.

And once you accept that as your aim, this is where you end up. And it is the aim. Look at the most heartfelt argument of enemies of the eleven-plus - that failing it was so 'traumatic' for those who didn't pass. No doubt it was. Look at what happened to John Prescott after he failed it. The poor man ended up as Deputy Prime Minister, so traumatised was he. For the sake of all those other little Prescotts, denied their grammar school place and their new bicycle back in the 1950s, and who never got to play croquet at Dorneywood, we must have a school system in which nobody is ever again upset by failing.

But life, alas, is full of failures, and some are more important than others. The long, slow 'trauma' of a life without knowledge, culture or hope, which is the alternative, is easier to bear because those responsible cannot be blamed directly. The misery of national decline, leading slowly downwards first to dependency and national squalor, then to subjugation, finally to slavery, likewise, is 'traumatic' but the people who caused it won't be around when it happens.

Then again, quite a lot of people's feelings are hurt by being bullied for being too obviously clever in class (a major problem) and by the feral nature many of the people they are forced to meet in comprehensive schools, supposedly for their own good. But the authorities never seem to be responsible for this. They have an 'effective anti-bullying policy', so if little Kylie goes off and hangs herself in her bedroom after three terms of uninterrupted torment, it can't have been the school's fault. Can it? All this, too, is the result of putting equality above education, and above discipline and authority. So it cannot be attacked without attacking the whole basis of our modern society.

This business of teachers not hurting people's feelings is terribly significant. They ought to feel free to do so, but these days they can certainly be disciplined for this and probably sued as well. . Both I in my private school and a good friend of the same age who was in the state school system in the late 1950s and early 1960s remember several teachers who felt it was their job to hurt our feelings, often several times a day. We wouldn't have learned our lessons otherwise, and we remember those ferocious, sarcastic teachers now with more affection than the forgotten, blander ones who never scared us. We have grown up to recognise that they knew what they were doing. Should they have been disciplined?

I clearly recall, more than ten years ago, attacking the exam system on the BBC 'Any Questions? ‘radio programme. In those days this was quite a difficult point to make, as conventional wisdom was still that everything was just fine. I said that the GCSE was about as valuable as a Scout badge. This may have been unfair on the Scouts, but it certainly wasn't unfair on this exam - introduced, please remember, by the market-obsessed Tory Sir Keith Joseph, who wanted everyone to have a certificate. The real problem, of providing good schools for people who were not academic, was considered too difficult to tackle, as it still is now.

As I left the hall - a school near Bristol - I discovered just what a difficult position this was going to be, if I intended to keep on saying it. One of the school's pupils came up to me and began to berate me about how unfair it was to suggest that exams had become easier. He had worked hard for his GCSEs, and how dare I suggest otherwise? I had insulted him, it was very wounding, etc etc. I was a nasty sort of person.

I tried to reason with this position, pointing out that hard work wasn't necessarily any use if you were doing the wrong thing, that the fault lay with those had devised the curriculum and the exam, not with those forced to take it, but his was an emotional position in which a general issue had been reduced to an alleged personal attack, and I couldn't really get his attention while he harangued me. You probably do have to be a bit nasty to take this sort of position, but so what? If you go into public politics, the important thing is not to be nice, but to be right. Or at least, that's what I used to think. Now, it's clear that more and more people value a warm smile and a charming manner way above being right. Look at Barack Obama. Is there now any future for a political figure who is prepared to tell the truth about the world?

I have since grown very used to this technique of making the political personal. Make a general statement on a major issue, and within 24 hours someone you've never met or heard of will have accused you of having 'insulted' them personally. The same is true if the topic is 'Brokeback Mountain', exams, single motherhood, bad schools, feeble policing, 'Dyslexia' or 'ADHD'.

I call this technique 'emotional censorship'. It shifts the issue from the failures of politicians to the sensitivities of individuals. These individuals have in fact been betrayed by those politicians. But, rather than be angry at the betrayal, they enter in an odd alliance with the very people who have betrayed them.

Why is this? Because what politicians offer their victims is freedom from responsibility. And a lot of people like that. Egalitarianism - the belief that we should do what we can to make all outcomes equal - is popular with everyone who fears personal failure based on a harsh objective judgement of his abilities. Which, at some time or other, is most of us.

That is why the worship of power has so completely swept away Protestant Christianity in so much of the advanced world. For as long as we can afford it, which I suspect will not be much longer, it is a very comfortable way of thinking. And where it has not swept away formal churchgoing, this is often because the Church has rewritten its gospel, and become a branch of social democratic politics. The Church originally urged people to take responsibility for their own actions, to follow conscience rather than the path of ease, to avoid debt, to work diligently, to blame themselves for their failures.

Modern mass politics does the opposite. Based on unceasing (?) economic growth which is shared with the millions, it offers the comforting illusion that all our cares can be heaped on the shoulders of government. We collude with the state to fail and not to be blamed for our failure. This leads to the mad idea that any disaster or event, national or personal, is somehow political. If a ship sinks, a minister must resign. If we get into debt, we will somehow be rescued. If we cannot be bothered to work for exams, we will still get a certificate. If we fail to bring up our children properly, we can drug them at state expense and then collect an allowance for doing so, And so on. In many cases, it means that, if we want to work, we must be employed by the state, and by taking its wages accept (in our outward lives) its way of thinking.

Real personal tragedies, the permanent loss of work through no fault of your own, the lonely penury of old age, catastrophic illness, are also dealt with by the same system, which makes it more acceptable to those with older values. But these hardships are often treated less generously than self-inflicted problems

This generally revolting, unfair and wasteful welfare system does immense damage at vast cost, subsidising bad decisions, destroying rigour in education, and encouraging people to do the wrong thing in their adult lives. But criticise any aspect of it, and you will quickly find yourself excoriated for 'insulting' single mothers, exam takers, parents of 'ADHD' children, etc.

I think and hope that the process of mass brainwashing, and mass bribery, has not yet quite succeeded. Millions do collude with the egalitarian state, happily accepting lower standards in return for evading responsibility for their own actions. But millions of others, I hope and trust, have not accepted this sordid bargain. They still prefer their independence and freedom, they aren't fooled by duff exams, they want a limited welfare state that rescues the genuinely needy. I am not sure they will be around for much longer in enough numbers to make a political difference. If they wish to change things, they had better act soon.

Like heroin, the egalitarian welfare state encourages people to become dependent on it, and so to become its defenders and advocates. If there ever was a 'silent majority' it has probably vanished, or is about to, though I could never see the point of a silent majority, myself. We have not got unlimited time to put this right.

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The shining-eyed, historically ignorant, idealists who imagined that you could solve the problems of Kosovo by invading it now have a great big baby on their doorstep, a new country that a lot of people don't really want, including its wretched Serb inhabitants. If the Serbs of Kosovo are persecuted and driven from their homes by Albanian nationalists, will we send a task force to overthrow the government of Kosovo? Of course not. The issue was never as simple as it as said to be, as we are now going to spend plenty of time finding out. The other bad legacy of the Kosovo war is that Washington and London decided it was easy to invade countries for their own good. So they decided to do it again in Iraq.

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It was good to see Sir Michael Jagger and Keith Richards (isn’t he a
knight yet? If not, why not? Plenty of other people are who are just as
qualified) warning against the perils of drugs. But isn't it a bit late
for these lined geezers to make this point? If anybody ever did
'experiment' with drugs, Keith Richard can be said to have done so,
though sadly (like other such experimenters) he did not take notes or
perhaps lost them. Even so, his notes are written on his face, for
anyone who cares to read them.

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16 February 2008 7:58 PM

It is hard to imagine an invention better suited to our times - a device that drives teenagers away without harming them, and which doesn't affect grown-ups.

At last the adult world has an answer to the hoodie in the train carriage, or on the bus, playing loud rock garbage on his mobile phone, and to the strange flocks of feral youths milling about in the street, or doing the other things that ferals do.

Switch on the machine, known as the Mosquito, and in a few minutes the problem will have gone. And the ferals won't even know why.

Actually, that's the only drawback of the machine. I'd prefer it if it inflicted some sort of medium-term pain and inconvenience, as a payback for all the discomfort, fear and misery that such people cause. How soon can I get a hand-held version?

All the old rules for dealing with this kind of trouble are inoperative.

Dare to rebuke a feral and you are well on the way to featuring in a tear-stained news report, including weeping children, a haggard widow, futile, excuse-making Chief Constables - and ending in the words that so beautifully sum up modern Britain "and then I saw them kicking his head as if it were a football". No thanks.

Let's accept that the police don't need us and expect the same in return.

Let's accept that large numbers of people under 21 are, in effect, unpredictable wild beasts who cannot safely be approached and don't even understand what manners or consideration - or fathers - are.

Let's accept that Labour and the Tories are never going to do anything about it and that the nice, gentle period of our history is over. And let's settle for what we can get.

Put aside those dreams and fantasies where the respectable bloke turns the tables on the muggers and louts. The reality is that you will have your head kicked as if it were a football.

Given that morality is dead and gone, that respect for parents and authority has evaporated, that we are in an accelerating slide into sordid barbarism, let us at least be pleased that the civilised have a small, legal weapon that they can use in their self-defence without the People's Police coming round and arresting us for protecting ourselves.

Do we ask for General Purpose Machine Guns? Or minefields in our front gardens? Or CS gas? We do not. We will settle for a mechanised whining noise inaudible to anyone over 21.

And they say that we cannot even do this. It is an infringement of human rights. Well, you might expect that from the Commissar, hired by the State to destroy what's left of adult authority over the young.

But Shami, whom I normally quite like, really ought to know better.

Listen to her drivelling: "Imagine the outcry if a device was introduced that caused blanket discomfort to people of one race or gender, rather than to our kids." Well, yes, imagine it. But this isn't that device, and if any of my 'kids' take to hanging round outside other people's property in menacing knots, then as far as I am concerned you can use a water cannon on them, as well as a Mosquito.

If they don't like it, they can go away, which is more than their victims can do.

Here we are, with jury trial, Habeas Corpus, freedom of movement, freedom of speech and conscience all under the most sustained attack for at least two centuries, and our principal pro-Liberty organisation is lending its name to a campaign to be nice to feral mobs.

Chuck it, Chakrabarti. You have better things to do, and you would have more support for doing them if you didn't alienate the exasperated people of Middle Britain in this silly fashion.

___________________________

Dwain, true face of the bogus Olympics

Dwain Chambers the cheat seems to me to be the perfect symbol of the whole bogus Olympic movement, now preparing to provide a giant figleaf for the Chinese police state.

Shameless cheating, achievements rendered meaningless by drugs and industrial training techniques, nationalism posing as sportsmanship, the laundering of gruesome regimes - these are the principles of the Olympics.

Mr Chambers should be signed up now to carry the Olympic torch (low-carbon, I trust) into the London stadium for the 2012 Games.

He will be a fitting herald for what will follow.

____________________________

The Archbishop should look after his own

Archbishop Rowan Williams and his supporters dared to pretend that we had all got him wrong, mainly by flourishing the turgid and foggy lecture that he gave on the subject.

But it wasn't the lecture that started the row, it was the bearded one's unusually clear remarks on the radio, in which he used the word "unavoidable".

I do hope nobody has been fooled by this spin, worthy of the dirtiest fighters in New Labour.

Meanwhile, the real point remains that, while the chief of the Church of England speaks up for Muslims, it is increasingly difficult for English Christians to follow their consciences in face of politically correct laws undermining marriage and punishing those who express doubts about homosexuality.

Who will speak for them?

____________________________

Obama worship has echoes of the Third Reich

This Barack Obama frenzy is getting out of hand. A Left-wing friend has emailed me a YouTube Obama propaganda video that reminds him - in technique - of Leni Riefenstahl's Hitler-worshipping film Triumph Of The Will.

I see what he means. To an insistent beat, impossibly beautiful, multiracial young men and women endlessly repeat the slogan "Yes, we can", in a disturbingly mindless way.

The thing contains no thought, no argument - just Obama worship.

Compared with this cult-like stuff, Hillary Clinton's clumping old-fashioned Leftism is almost reassuring.

____________________________

As soon as the Government stops telling lies about education, I'll stop telling the truth about its disgraceful failure to educate our young.

Higher Education Minister Bill Rammell last week repeated the falsehood that it is the fault of Oxford and Cambridge that they take so few students from poor homes.

The truth is that it is the fault of Labour and the Tories, who slammed the doors of good schools in the faces of the poor by abolishing grammar schools.

I also know of at least one comprehensive in Mr Rammell's own constituency that tells its bright pupils it is "a waste of time" to apply to Oxbridge. He might turn his attention there, if he is really interested.

____________________________

Once again the youthful killer in a campus shooting, Steve Kazmierczak, is reported to have been on an (unnamed) "medication".

This is only partly about guns. American teenagers have had guns for centuries. It is these "medications" that are new. Drugging the young is wrong and dangerous.

15 February 2008 6:02 PM

My colleague Liz Jones thinks men should be angry if their "driven,
highly educated mate" decides to stay at home and raise the next
generation.

Why? They should be pleased. What better use for a good education is
there than to pass on what you have learned to your children?

Does Ms Jones really think schools will endow pupils with the wisdom
of the ages and sow the seeds of reading, imagination and poetry? Fat
chance.

Why is it better to slog off to an office, to stare at computer
screens and compose memos in the Martian dialect of modern business
before eventually slogging home via the wine bar to collect the
children from some day orphanage or bog-standard school, where they
will have spent the day having their brains filled with TV rubbish?

This disdain for the most honourable and valuable task that falls to
us is a disease in our society. I suspect those who express it are
trying to hide from themselves that it is wrong.

If our wounded civilisation lasts another hundred years, our
grandchildren will be horrified by the cruel, self-indulgent lies we
told ourselves to justify the dumping and neglect of an entire
generation, in return for nothing better than cash and handbags.

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13 February 2008 6:37 PM

I love the Church of England. By that I do not mean its bishops, its arid modern prayers and poetry-free, unmemorable modern bibles, nor its stripped and carpeted modernised churches, its compulsory handshakes, perky modern hymns or happy-clappy conventicles where everyone is saved. If I'm saved it was such a narrow squeak that I think it wiser not to go on about it, as the man said.

What I love is the wondrous Elizabethan settlement which refused to make windows into men's souls and allowed Catholics and Protestants to forget their differences in a rather beautiful ambiguity.

That settlement is expressed in several ways. It lingers in buildings, in books, in music, a sort of ghostly presence just within reach at certain times of day and in a few unravaged, unwrecked parts of this country. It also continues to survive as a body of thought, song and literature, quite immune from the peculiar bureaucratic organisation which currently uses the Church's name.

It is still often to be found in churches and cathedrals which - though sadly stripped of much loveliness - managed to retain and guard far more of their pre-Reformation mystery and art than in any other Protestant country.

It is to be found in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, itself quarried from Coverdale's Bible and from the later Authorised Version, written in the Golden Age of the English language by people who understood poetry, cadence, music and memory - and who were concerned to keep what they could of a much older heritage.

I don't expect to carry Roman Catholics with me here, as they have long ago constructed a myth about the Church of England which is, like all good myths, rooted in truth but yet not entirely true. The torture and judicial murder of Roman Catholic martyrs such as Edmund Campion remain as a gory stain on Elizabeth and on the Anglican tradition. But Campion (as Evelyn Waugh's fine biography makes clear) sought his martyrdom and refused all opportunities to evade it.

Thomas More and John Fisher were martyred by Henry VIII, not really over doctrine but over the King's desire to have his first marriage annulled, something which might easily have been done by the Roman Catholic Church under slightly different political circumstances. More and Fisher, now recognised as men of courage and integrity, perjured and judicially murdered, appear on the most recent Anglican Calendar of Saints.

And that is in spite of the fact that More himself was no mean persecutor of Protestants, sending several followers of Luther to die in the flames (for Henry VIII killed anyone who got in his way, Catholic or Protestant). He was not, perhaps, the near-perfect man portrayed in that matchless film 'A Man for All Seasons', but his courage - like that of his opponents - is amazing to us.

I may be wrong, but I do not think that Thomas Cranmer is to be found on any such Roman Catholic calendar. Like many Anglicans, I've attended Roman Catholic churches and cathedrals for Mass (in which I don't take Communion because I think that I'm not entitled to do so, my beliefs being insufficiently clear on the subject, and also because I suspect that by doing so I might upset Roman Catholics) and for Vespers. But I have seldom found a Roman Catholic who knew much about Anglicanism or its services.

I also tend to think that the Roman Catholic concentration upon the English Martyrs ( the murals in the Brompton Oratory and St Aloysius in Oxford are particularly striking examples of this) are a bit of a propagandist 'you did it too' response to the rather larger persecution of Protestants by Mary.

And most of those who feature in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, the roll call of Mary's Protestant victims, were obscure and powerless people, not garlanded academics like Campion or great men like More and Fisher, but even so caught up in a great battle and compelled by circumstances to be heroic when they never meant to be.

These events are horrible to study, even now. And the arguments involved seem amazingly unimportant at this distance. But by comparison with what was happening, and what would happen on the Continent, especially the Thirty Years War that gave Hieronymus Bosch a guide to what Hell looked like, they were small and merciful.

Importantly, when they were over a reasonable compromise was available for those who wanted one. I have never seen any reason why the most devout Catholic could not both attend and take a full part in the Anglican services of Morning and Evening Prayer, alongside an equally devout Protestant. These are ancient monastic offices, after all. And even the Anglican Communion Service seems to me to be so worded that a Roman Catholic could take part in it without doing violence to his creed. Many Anglicans who think of themselves as Catholics (but not Roman Catholics) have used this form, with minor variations.

The Anglican wedding service still seems to me to be the most beautiful and the most coherent statement of what marriage ought to be, ever crafted. It is astonishing that for centuries this ceremony, as magnificent and uplifting as a coronation, has been readily available to anyone in the country - though of course modern priests prefer not to use it.

The funeral service, likewise, has a power and seriousness which at least tries to cope with the cold, cruel majesty of death, and the rawness of the open grave on the cold afternoon. The General Thanksgiving (which features rather surprisingly in Sebastian Faulks's ‘Birdsong’) ought to be learned by heart by children. Many of the collects are profound but intensely simple poetry.

By both accident and design the result seems to me to have been remarkably benign, and also rather beautiful and compelling, generally under the direction of learned and broad-minded men who saw that it was often better to blur differences than to emphasise them. Most important, it has found its way into the English language and into our manners, customs and dealings with each other, and connecting the most ordinary life with religious thought and sentiment.

Even the works of P.G.Wodehouse contain references to the Authorised Version and to the Prayer Book, and Bible and Prayer Book have huge entries in the 'Oxford Dictionary of Quotations' often of phrases which we use in daily speech without any idea where they came from. English attitudes and behaviour have been formed by this extraordinary flowering of religious poetry. "Why spit on your luck?", W.H.Auden asked, when the Church sought to abandon its most precious possessions. But spit they did, and they're still doing it now. Even so, the lingering afterglow is important in our lives and perhaps not lost forever.

That's why I care about Rowan Williams, and his excursion into the subject of Sharia law. I may generally ignore Archbishop Rowan, as I have little time for his prose style, designed to conceal rather than reveal, in my view. And he seems to me to be a nitwit in worldly matters, having been a dupe of the disarmers back in 1985 - which rather devalues his later opposition to the Iraq war. My Church-of-England-in-exile continues to exist without him, and in spite of him and those like him.

But I am not sure it can survive indefinitely under such leadership. If parsons and bishops wish to rage against each other in factions, Catholic versus Evangelical, then that is a pity and I wish they would stop. There are better things for them to do. But if the man appointed to head the Christian Church in England declares that the adoption of some aspects of Sharia law "seems unavoidable" in this country; if her muses publicly about the possible recognition of Sharia courts in marital law, financial transactions and mediation (and he undeniably did both these things) then he is toying with something far bigger - the future of England (and Britain) as a Christian society.

For me, the main problem is not what he said, but that it was he who said it. A Muslim cleric, a Guardian leader-writer or a leading academic (perhaps Professor Howard Kirk, as he no doubt now is, Vice Chancellor of the University of Watermouth) might have mouthed this stuff ( and, yes, I have trudged and hacked my way through the whole verbal jungle) and that would have been that.

But for the Archbishop of Canterbury to do this is a clean different thing. Who else, in our ruling elite, is going to argue that we are and must remain a Christian nation, our laws based (as they are) on Christian precept? Crudely, Dr Williams is paid to defend the Christian faith. To say that something is 'unavoidable' is almost always to say that you aren't prepared to do anything to avoid it, or - worse - that you may actually favour it but daren't say so. Supporters of the European Single Currency would often claim that it, too, was 'inevitable, a very effective way of demoralising people who knew no better and didn't understand its importance. Most things are avoidable if you have the determination to fight them. Sharia law in Britain certainly is.

I also didn't like his attempt to say that only Muslim 'primitivists' held to the most worrying tenets of Sharia, or that worries about such things were 'dramatic fears'. This isn't so. Look how difficult it is to get Muslim spokesmen to denounce such things as the stoning of adulterous women, or Sharia's penalties for homosexuals. My discussion with Islamic scholars at Deoband a couple of years ago ( all calm, soft-spoken bearded scholars much like Dr Williams) left me pretty sure that they would never budge on things like the lesser position of women, or the death penalty for those who desert Islam. It couldn't be changed, they insisted.

So what is Dr Williams talking about when he speaks of "the free decision to be and continue a member of the umma" (umma being the Arabic name for the body of the Muslim faithful)?

Islam has many doors, but no exits. You cannot leave. This is regarded as non-negotiable by every Muslim cleric I have talked to. So what's this free decision to continue, that Dr Williams talks about?

There's nothing to be gained in calls for Dr Williams to resign. He's not the Home Secretary, and he serves under different rules from those that govern politicians. In any case, it would do no good unless he were replaced by someone better. That can only happen if the people of England decide to take back possession of their national church, and the church, revived, begins to find a new leadership less interested in faction and modernisation, and more interested in the reconversion of England to Christianity.

Hopeless? Probably, but not definitely. If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars. My generation, that of the post-war baby bulge, are the ones almost wholly absent from Britain's churches. You'll find quite a few people in their late 60s and 70s, and in some places a lot of people under 35 in Anglican churches on any Sunday. But those born between 1945 and 1955 generally aren't there (except in the form of clergy and Bishops - Dr Williams was born in 1950). It may just be that the children of the Me Generation are pretty sick of the organised selfishness they see around them, and in the mood for some reasonable Christianity, perhaps with some poetry thrown in. I live in hope.

But, as I've warned before, if the Christian church doesn't take advantage of the approaching religious revival, which I think cannot be long delayed, someone else will. And that someone will argue much more powerfully for Sharia law than Rowan Williams ever did. And I can't see the Muslims, if they become a great force in Britain, paying much attention to the maintenance of a separate Christian law. They are serious and determined people, who believe staunchly in their religion and hope for its ultimate triumph. So, no, I don't think the Church of England should be allowed to die. We need it more than we ever have.

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09 February 2008 8:14 PM

The poor old Ayatollah of Canterbury doesn't actually deserve all the slime now being tipped over his modernised mitre. Just some of it.

Of course it is absurd for the chief of the Christian Church in this country to cringe publicly to Islam. But at least Archbishop Williams is open about his unwillingness to defend the faith – as is his colleague, the wretched Bishop of Oxford, who recently announced that he was perfectly happy for loudspeakers to blare the Muslim call to prayer across that city.

Even on their own liberal terms, this pair are clueless about sharia and its scorn for women.It was exiled Iranian Muslim women who defeated a similar proposal in Canada. They had travelled thousands of miles to escape sharia law and didn't want it in Toronto, thanks very much.

Compare that with the Government, which poses stern-faced as the foe of "terror" and noisily jails figures of fun such as Abu Hamza while greasily pretending that there's no connection between Islam and terrorism.

Gordon Brown's Cabinet has also quietly agreed that Muslim men with more than one wife can now claim benefits for these extra spouses – while bigamy remains a criminal offence for everyone else, punishable by up to seven years in prison.

And what about the discreet little Whitehall celebrations of the Muslim festival of Eid, attended by highly placed civil servants?

Or the incessant multi-faith propaganda in supposedly Christian State schools, where children known to me have been pestered to draw pictures of mosques but are given virtually no instruction in the faith and scripture of our own established Church?

Why is it that in Britain, alone of all countries in the world, the most exalted, educated and privileged have all lost the will to defend their own home? Most of us liked it the way it was before they began to "modernise" it.

I know of nowhere else where those most richly rewarded by a free society are so anxious to trash the place that gave them birth and liberty.

_________________________________________________________

Helena's Sweeney Todd, a gory slice of musical tripe

What joy to learn that cinemagoers are walking out of the new Tim Burton movie Sweeney Todd once they discover that it is a musical, a fact omitted from the trailers.

Watching Johnny Depp and the increasingly strange Helena Bonham Carter trilling away as the blood flows is hardly a good way of spending an evening, unless the alternative is extraordinary rendition.

Nothing could induce me to go to a Tim Burton film anyway. If I want to be put off my lunch I can always watch Prime Minister's Questions.

But why anyone on earth should wish to watch a musical about cannibalism, I really do not know. What is it about film critics? Why do they praise such weird productions?

This week most of them (though not our excellent Matthew Bond) are simpering about There Will Be Blood, a creepy festival of tedium that drags on for a bladder-busting 150 minutes, contains not one sympathetic character and makes no sense at all.

Go and see the under-rated Charlie Wilson's War instead. There's a fair bit of profanity, but it's funny, true, instructive and worth seeing alone for the moment when Congressman Wilson asks the President of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan for a large Scotch.

________________________________________________________________

Nurturing children - perfect job for 'a mate'

My colleague Liz Jones thinks men should be angry if their "driven, highly educated mate" decides to stay at home and raise the next generation.

Why? They should be pleased. What better use for a good education is there than to pass on what you have learned to your children?

Does Ms Jones really think schools will endow pupils with the wisdom of the ages and sow the seeds of reading, imagination and poetry? Fat chance.

Why is it better to slog off to an office, to stare at computer screens and compose memos in the Martian dialect of modern business before eventually slogging home via the wine bar to collect the children from some day orphanage or bog-standard school, where they will have spent the day having their brains filled with TV rubbish?

This disdain for the most honourable and valuable task that falls to us is a disease in our society. I suspect those who express it are trying to hide from themselves that it is wrong.

If our wounded civilisation lasts another hundred years, our grandchildren will be horrified by the cruel, self-indulgent lies we told ourselves to justify the dumping and neglect of an entire generation, in return for nothing better than cash and handbags.

________________________________________________________________

We've discovered the blindingly obvious ... yet nothing changes

It's time to set up a University of the Blindingly Obvious, just to cope with all the amazing discoveries about what's wrong with Britain now being made by the people who didn't notice when it mattered.

Warnings issued in this column over the past seven years or so, derided or ignored at the time, are now becoming conventional wisdom, for what that's worth.

Week after week, learned reports emerge concluding that the police spend too much time filling in forms, that children do better with married parents, that multi-culturalism breaks up our society, that mass immigration hurts the poor, that cannabis rots the brain, that social mobility stopped when the grammar schools were closed.

And after the report comes out, absolutely nothing happens. Nothing.

And do you know why? Because our entire Establishment don't care.

They want the police handcuffed by rules designed by Left-wing lawyers.

They like mass immigration. They want to be free to smoke dope, or let their children do it.

They can buy good education for their own young, but prefer egalitarian dud schools for your offspring, because it's a principle, see?

You can be as outraged as you like about this, just as you are about Britannia being removed from the coinage.

You can be completely opposed to the acceleration of anti-marriage propaganda into school sex lessons, under the guidance of homosexual militants.

But will it make any difference? No it won't. Labour, Lib Dem and Tory alike all support these things, and the discredited ideas that lie behind them.

As long as you support any of them, especially the useless, useless Tories – who are worse than the others because they pretend to be against what they're actually for – you'll get exactly what you deserve.

________________________________________________________________If all advertising of tobacco products is forbidden, how come the country is plastered with posters urging us to buy cigarette papers? Is it because New Labour doesn't think they will be used for smoking tobacco?

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06 February 2008 11:32 AM

I have spent the last week in Chicago and other parts of Illinois, and find it very difficult to switch my mind from America back to Britain. There is nowhere in the world more foreign to an Englishman than the USA, because our common language allows us to penetrate so much more deeply into that country than into any other. To be able to travel between the two in a matter of seven hours is an astonishing thing, but it's also disconcerting to be in two such utterly different places in such a short space of time.

So I thought it was better to stay away from British affairs while I decompressed, and instead to give some general replies to comments on this blog - and of course on my column, which is now posted here as well. As always, the "Demetriou" and "Boatang" alliance has been swift to chide and slow to bless. They are curiously unchastened by those occasions when they have been found to be a little wanting , but in general, through their obtuseness and bumptiousness can be infuriating, I would rather have them than not. They sometimes remind me of one of the great Labour correspondents of the 1970s, who would infuriate his colleagues at press conferences by asking absurdly simple questions - which the powerful usually couldn't answer.

And as always, some of my supporters have taken positions I disagree with. For instance, I absolutely do not admire Rudolph Giuliani (whose sneaky support for Irish republicanism turned me off him many years ago), nor do I see New York City as a model for how our police should operate.

American cities are not like British cities, and New York is not at all like London. The physical shape, the traditions, manners and customs, the climate, the cultural mix are entirely different. Also American cops are armed, and they are cops. They have never had the relationship with the people that British constables used to have. Of course foot patrolling is labour intensive. But then again, we have more police officers than we have ever had before, either as a proportion of the population or as a raw total. It simply isn't true that we don't have enough people to mount foot patrols on housing estates. At a pinch bicycles are pretty good. The great defect of cars is that you can drive straight past a crime taking place, with a screaming victim, and neither hear nor see it. Not so on foot, or on a bike.

My comparison is not with the American present, but with the British recent past, where I think we can find many useful lessons about how things could be done better than they are now. The point about the Police and Criminal Evidence Act is that the codes of practice based upon (though not to be found in it) it transformed policing. They encoded the beliefs of left-wing lawyers about the police, beliefs based on cases which were in my view untypical, such as the Challoner and Confait affairs. They were hopelessly idealist. And they were enacted by a Tory government which (as usual) had little idea of what it was doing.

The form-filling is partly due to those codes (which also created a minor industry in compelling the police to hold identity parades - I once joined the end of a long queue in the centre of Bradford and asked what it was for. "Oh, this is the queue for identity parade volunteers. It's a tenner a time", I was told. Tax free, apparently. Alas, I couldn't spare the time) partly due to the more recent Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and partly due to a series of judgements on the admissibility of evidence which Parliament has not seen fit to overrule with legislation. The point remains. The police are now the employees of the liberal state rather than, as they used to be, the servants of the Law.

And I have been on motorised "patrol" with the police, in London, Dallas and Johannesburg. I have seldom seen anything so futile. It is precisely because of the uselessness of this activity, observed at close quarters, that I am so certain of the need to return to foot patrols. This has nothing to do with my dislike of motor cars, as alleged. Though I do think too many male police officers regard cars as toys to be played with, and view an opportunity to drive fast, with lights flashing and sirens blaring to be the highlight of the day. In this, they are not unlike a lot of other males, who suffer from the same (to me) baffling confusion of engine noise with virility.

Mark Stott's point about the Opposition pledging to repeal bad legislation is an interesting one. Did Mrs Thatcher's Tories say it all that much in the late 1970s? I'm not sure. What is interesting is that Labour certainly never gave up. Labour's derided 1983 manifesto, the supposed longest-suicide note in history - has largely been implemented by sideways means except of course for the pledge to leave the Common Market, or whatever it was called in 1983. That has been utterly dropped.

Why do people like "Tony" never actually look at the monarchy they tediously condemn? Nobody has claimed Divine Right since the departure of the Stuarts. I know some of you regret this, but the whole point of the 1688 revolution was that monarchy became a constitutional one. If what he actually means is 'inheritance', doctors who often inherit their skills from their parents, but they are of course expected to train. I don't suppose he 'want his surgeon to be elected either, would he? It's a false parallel.

By the way, I don't think Prince Charles is a liberal at all. I think many of his ideas are profoundly conservative and I am specially impressed by his serious interest in architecture, the most powerful of the arts, which has a huge influence on human happiness and behaviour. But I was slightly disappointed to learn that he had expressed a wish to meet me, because he appreciated my book 'The Abolition of Britain' but was talked out of it by aides on the grounds that it would be unwise to have any contact with such a person.

If I were arrested, I should not be screaming for 'PACE. The rights the benefits I should want would be the following. :The right to silence (abolished by Michael Howard), the right to a public trial by a jury of my peers, whose unanimous verdict would decide my guilt or innocence,(abolished by Roy Jenkins) , the presumption of innocence (increasingly lacking in much legislation) and the right to be confronted by the witnesses against me (increasingly circumscribed). These lost protections are a million times more useful to an innocent person than the 'protections' of PACE etc, which simply make life easier for the guilty.

David Lindsay has misunderstood my point about the BBC's anti-southern bias. It is not that the BBC is specially committed to covering the North any better. It just dislikes the southern English middle class accent with which it is still associated. Listen to the continuity announcers on Radio 4, and particularly to the announcers chosen to read the Shipping Forecast these days, and note now the old Received Pronunciation is disappearing.

Even where it is used, the jarring employment of the flat 'a' often appears. People in the South just don't say the ‘a’ in 'Newcastle' to rhyme with 'bat'. They just don't. It doesn't come naturally. And when Matthew Parris pronounced the second 'a' in 'Aldermaston' to rhyme with 'bat', it was the first time in more than 40 years of hearing this word that I had ever heard it pronounced so. Even 'First Great Western' station announcers at Reading don't do this when they read off 'Aldermaston' as one of the stations on the Newbury Line. And by the way, from where I sit, the Radio 4 weather forecasts seem to spend a third of their time discussing the thinly-populated tracts of Scotland, another third, dealing with Wales and Northern Ireland, and then a brief hurried mention of 'England', as the weather was the same from Carlisle to Canterbury. As a cyclist, I listen carefully. But this isn't pro-North. It's anti-South. It's important to distinguish between the two.

As for making MPs use public transport, I don't envisage electric cattle prods. I just wouldn't pay expenses for anything but buses or trains, unless there was no reasonable alternative. And I would sell off the special car park for MPs. MPs should use buses and trains. It would be amazing how quickly these things would improve, if they did.

"James G" says that Anthony Blair's support fro George W. Bush was based on principle. I do not think so. Mr Blair thought that he could get United Nations cover for an attack on Saddam. He was convinced (and briefed his media friends to this effect) that the French would support this. By the time he found out that this was not going to happen, it was too late to jump clear. Is it courageous or principled to refuse to jump off a moving train because you are too frightened to do so? This dithering was exactly in character with the man, who once literally ran away from a TV news crew, rather than answer questions about a railway strike(This when he was employment spokesman for the Labour opposition) .

Mr Blair had said clearly that he was willing to leave Saddam alone if he gave up his alleged weapons. How could that square with his later discovery of 'principles' about bringing 'democracy' to Iraq? It’s simply not true. He got into the same mess with Slobodan Milosevic, in the dress rehearsal for Iraq, the Kosovo aggression (which I also opposed). At one point he actually said by mistake that Milosevic should 'step down' , and Downing Street had to brief hurriedly that he had meant to say 'step back' - since at that time official policy was to leave Milosevic in place. Later, of course, he was all for overthrowing him. But he got away with that.